Send To vs. Sharing [Was: Proposal: gnome-user-share]

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Alan Cox">

> On Iau, 2004-12-02 at 15:47, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > might not be set up, you might have no, or a slow internet connection
> > etc. Really, "File sharing" is not the ideal name for this, perhaps it
> > should be called "network file transfering".
> 
> The modern version of this and thus the interface people are becoming used
> to is bluetooth/irda "Send foo to bar" functionality. The more I think
> about this the more I'd rather we followed the phone world of sending
> things to people. It avoids so much "oh I forgot about.." mess, it avoids
> magic directory naming and it becomes a single natural menu item that
> matches peoples phone experience. Click file, hit "Send", select "Dave's
> computer" hit OK. The user hasn't got to know if it was sent via
> bluetooth, irda, internet, uucp or carrier pigeon. The user hasn't got to
> remember to unshare it, the user hasn't got to move files back and forth.

This make a heck of a lot of sense to me. 'Bluetooth File Sharing' from
Edd's great gnome-bluetooth stack is currently very lonely; nothing else
works like it.

On one side, you'd have a central daemon and configuration tool managing
'accepting files', allowing for different protocols to be enabled or
disabled at will. This would turn on the "i accept files" advertising in
bluetooth, dns-sd (which protocol?), enable irda, etc. On the other side,
you'd have a simple send-to plugin in Nautilus, and possibly a drag target
in the panel, etc.

This makes a *lot* of sense, particularly after watching OS X users using
their integrated bluetooth tools. Of course, it's quite different from
g-u-s, but I strongly agree that it's a better model.

- Jeff

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